


when the sun came up (you were looking at me)

by Veridique



Category: Vampire Academy & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Canon, canon compliant mental illness, even good couples fight sometimes, mentions of canon-compliant torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 11:44:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16680979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Veridique/pseuds/Veridique
Summary: But as he looks up at his wife, wrapped up in his coat, he can see the ghosts of all the people who claimed to love her who turned on her the moment she failed to perform.He doesn’t want to be something else she needs to fear.The worst nightmares infiltrate mornings. Sydney fears her best will not be good enough. Adrian is adamant that theirs will be.





	when the sun came up (you were looking at me)

**Author's Note:**

> Shoutout to [Chrome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chrome) for inspiring me with the tag “even good couples fight sometimes”—you can read that fic [here.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15696165)

It’s early morning when Adrian wakes—earlier than Sydney’s alarm, hours before sunrise. He feels his wife stirring in bed beside him, but she doesn’t rise from the bed. Rolling over to face her, he can see her curled into a fetal position facing away from him, trembling.

This isn’t his first time waking her from a nightmare. Sometimes she wakes crying, desperate for him to wrap his arms around her and surround her with his warmth, putting pressure on as much of her skin as he could to ground her into the waking world. Other times, she wakes screaming and fighting, ready to go toe-to-toe with the monsters of her dreams, and he listens to any words she needed to get out, whether it was curses and diatribes against the people who’d hurt her, or her frustration with her own recovery going slowly (but _going,_ he reminds her, once she exhausts her flow of words and lays her head against his shoulder).

But this time, as he puts his hand to her waist, it’s different. Because Sydney isn’t asleep.

A split second before his palm touches her nightshirt, he notices that her eyelids are just barely open, just enough to expose a sliver of brown iris to the light emanating from the tiny plug-in light they keep in the outlet near the door. As he rests his hand on her waist, in what he intends as a comforting gesture, her eyes squeeze shut and her trembling stops abruptly, as he feels her muscles tense under his hand.

“Sydney?” he whispers.

When he doesn’t get a response after a moment, he pulls his hand back. He’s seen this, too—seen Sydney go nonverbal, trapped inside memories, or inside those fears that lived too deep down for words. He’d promised her long ago that he’d never lay a hand on her if she didn’t want him to, and although his touch usually calms and comforts her, he’d rather err on the side of restraint than ever be in danger of breaking that promise.

He rises and rounds the foot of the bed to kneel on the floor at her side of the bed. Her eyes are still pressed shut, and she’s still frozen still.

“Sydney, I’m here,” he whispers. He receives no response; he didn’t expect one. He calls up in his memory the litany of reminders— _affirmations,_ the therapist had called them—the list Sydney had come up with of things she wanted to hear when things got bad. “It’s Adrian. I’m right by your side, and we’re safe. I’m here for you, whatever you need.”

Her eyes open just a bit, but she doesn’t look at him. Her lips barely part as she seethes “Get away from me.”

He stands up, backs off, his heart filling with worry. It’s not the first time she’s needed physical space, but the bridled rage in her voice is unlike her, even at her worst.

“I’m here,” he murmurs again, standing in the doorway a few feet from her. It’s a distance that feels like a mile to him, when all he wants is to wrap her up in his arms and make everything better. But there are parts of Sydney’s mind that he can’t fix, and her needs come first. “We’re safe. Whatever you need. You’re in charge.”

“I’m in charge?” Her voice is icy, almost challenging him.

“Absolutely. No one is going to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”

She gets up from the bed, still not looking directly at Adrian. As she moves toward the door, he steps aside, giving her space to pass through the door without touching him, but she still turns sideways and presses herself up against the doorframe, making herself take up as little space as possible. He follows her into the hallway, through the kitchen and toward the outside door.

“Wait, Sydney.” He doesn’t want to tell her what to do, not now, after he just promised her that she was in charge. But it’s December in Pennsylvania, and she’s barefoot. “Let me grab your coat and boots first.”

She doesn’t respond, as her trembling hands try to undo the chain on the door.

“Sydney, if you want to go for a walk, I understand, but there’s snow on the ground, and you’re in your pajamas. Please put on a coat.” His voice wavers and rises in pitch as he pleads with her. This isn’t a situation they prepared for in therapy; he has plans and structures in place for mitigating his own self-destructive impulses, but this isn’t like Sydney at all.

She doesn’t turn, doesn’t even acknowledge she’s heard him. She’s finally got the chain undone, and as she reaches for the lock, Adrian grabs the first coat-shaped object within arm’s reach and throws it over her shoulders.

She turns sharply, pressing herself against the sill of the window beside the door as she backs away from him. As she looks at him for the first time, she staggers, leaning on the armchair beside her for support.

“Do you want to sit down?” he asks.

She doesn’t speak but lowers herself into the armchair.

_At least she’s not out in the snow._ “What can I do?” he asks, wringing his hands.

“Don’t touch me.” The vitriol is gone from her voice, replaced by an almost childlike fragility that scares Adrian even more than the rage.

“Okay.” He slowly sits on the sofa, on the opposite end from his wife’s armchair. Sydney fingers the buttons of the grey wool coat draped over her shoulders, and Adrian belatedly realizes it’s his.

“What can I do?” he asks again.

She signs something. They’ve been working on learning sign together, for times when she doesn’t have enough words or for times when he has too many, racing through his mind without letting him take a breath. But Sydney is learning faster than Adrian, and he doesn’t recognize the sign.

“Fingerspell?” he asks, both out loud and in sign, just in case one or the other is easier for her to understand in her current state.

Her hand flashes out a few letters; it takes him a moment to process the signs into a meaningful word: MEDS.

He races to their bedroom, grateful to have a goal. His and hers pill containers hadn’t been his idea of a fun newlywed present, but he’s thankful for his wife’s careful organization: days of the week, morning and evening doses. As he reaches for Sydney’s pill organizer, he notices that the last three days of her evening medication are still there. He curses under his breath at himself for not noticing, as he gathers the pill from last night and the one she should take this morning (since it’s technically morning now), fills her toothbrush cup with water, and brings them out to the living room.

Sydney hasn’t moved, still draped in Adrian’s grey coat. He hands her the water cup, then offers her the pills.

“I think you forgot to take this one last night.”

She holds her hand out, and he drops both pills into her palm. She swallows them together, not looking at him.

“Actually, I think you forgot to take it the past few nights.”

“What do you want me to say?” The anger is back in her voice.

“I want to know if it was an accident? If you just forgot, or if you…” He trails off as he sits back down, not sure what the ending of that sentence should be.

“The first night was,” she says, after a moment. “Just an accident. But I felt _fine_. And then I didn’t take it the second night, and I was still _fine_.”

_But you’re not fine now,_ he almost says. Instead, he asks “And how do you feel now?”

“About as good as I ever will.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means I’m not a princess, Adrian.”

“I don’t know what that means, either.”

“It means where the hell do we get off thinking we get a happy ending?” She shrugs off the coat, letting it bunch around her hips. “We’re two disasters from dysfunctional families who got married so that your queen would harbor me as a refugee. Neither of us knows how to make a marriage work.”

“We’re not doomed to repeat our parents’ mistakes. And I married you because I love you, no other reason.”

“That’s bull—”

“Sydney, did you eat dinner last night?”

She blinks in surprise at the sudden change of topic. “What?”

“Because I emptied the dishwasher yesterday afternoon, and when I came in last night, there weren’t any new dishes.” He’d been out late last night with some friends, the handful of drinking buddies who still talked to him since he’d switched to ginger ales and Shirley Temples. The night before that, Sydney had been working late, and the night before that, they’d been at a party that had had snacks, but no proper meal. Their usual routine of sitting down to dinner together had been upset three nights in a row, and he couldn’t help but notice that the disruption corresponded to when Sydney stopped taking her meds.

“Oh, so you’re checking up on me now?”

He doesn’t rise to the challenge in her tone. “Yes. I love you. I want to know when you’re having a tough time.”

“You could ask.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

She looks taken aback, and Adrian wonders if she had been expecting a fight. Adrian can be confrontational—he’ll take a heated conversation over an icy silence any day—but this isn’t a subject to fight over.

“So. This is me asking. I can tell something’s up. Nightmare?”

She doesn’t respond.

“Panic attack?”

She leans her head back against the armchair. “I don’t know what to call it.”

“Tell me about it?”

“Just a thought.” She pulls the coat back up over her shoulders and pulls it tight around her, slowly fingering one of the buttons. “A stupid thought, and I couldn’t shake it.”

“What was it?”

She pulls her knees up to her chest, curling her feet under herself. “Did your family ever talk about arranging a marriage for you?”

“What?”

“I know it’s still done, among some of the royal elites. Strengthening bonds, maintaining bloodlines, all that. Your parents were an arranged marriage, weren’t they?”

“I’m…not sure.” He’s suspected as much, but he’s astounded that Sydney speaks with such confidence about under-the-table arrangements among Moroi royalty, especially for someone who wasn’t raised in that world.

“There are a lot of Ivashkovs. Your family’s made connections with most of the other major families.” She closes her eyes, the way she does when she’s recalling memorized lists and tables. “The last marriage between the Badicas and Ivashkovs was what, fifteen, twenty years ago? And that was a Badica lord to an Ivashkov lady; I’ll bet your family would love to arrange a marriage where the children inherit the Ivashkov name.”

“Stop it.”

“And one of the Badica girls is around the right age. I think she went to school with Rose and Lissa—”

“Stop it!” He doesn’t want to think about this, about his wife playing what-if scenarios about his family’s plans for a political marriage.

“But you married me.”

“And I wouldn’t change it for the world. Where is this coming from?”

“I’m never going to be that.” Her voice falters. “I’m never going to be royal, or Moroi, or even a guardian like Rose.”

“Don’t compare yourself to Rose—”

“I’m not.” He can see tears beginning to well in her eyes, and she blinks slowly to hold them back. “But I can’t give you that. And the thought that I can’t shake is that someday you’re going to ask me for the one thing I _can_ give you.”

He doesn’t respond. He thinks he knows what she means, but he wants to be wrong.

He isn’t wrong.

“I see how they look at me—our friends, even, sometimes. Anytime I’m wearing a scarf or a turtleneck, they watch me like a hawk, watching to see if I’m looking pale, or high. They think you’re biting me.”

“Sydney—”

“Do you think about it?”

He considers lying, briefly, considers telling her what she wants to hear. But what she needs to hear is the truth, even if it hurts him. “I have stupid thoughts that I can’t shake, too, sometimes,” he admits, eyes downcast.

But as he thinks about it, it’s been weeks since he’s heard Tatiana’s voice in his head. The progress of therapy, both individual and with Sydney, combined with medication, has gotten him to a place he couldn’t have imagined a year ago. His mind belongs to him, not to his dead aunt or to his mood swings. And Adrian can’t think of Sydney as anything but his brilliant, beautiful wife. Her being human hardly occurs to him at all.

But as he looks up at his wife, wrapped up in his coat, he can see the ghosts of all the people who claimed to love her who turned on her the moment she failed to perform. She doesn’t share many of the details of what happened to her in the months before they got married, but he’s picked up on bits and pieces, mostly from the things that she still flinches at—pitch darkness, security cameras in places she doesn’t expect them, doomsday preachers on street corners screaming about sin.

He doesn’t want to be something else she needs to fear.

Her hands clench tight around each other, pressed up against her heart. “Thoughts are just thoughts.” It’s a line their therapist has taught them, for when they need to check their reality against their perceptions.

He nods. “They’re not good or bad, but they can be helpful or unhelpful.”

“My thoughts that you could hurt me aren’t helpful.”

“They are if there’s something I can do to make you feel safer.”

“I don’t think there’s anything you can do, but thank you.”

Her tone makes it sound like that’s the end of the conversation, but Adrian wants to help. He needs to feel like he’s part of the solution. “What do you think triggered the thought this time?”

She shrugs. “I haven’t had dinner for three nights. Old insecurities rear their heads when I fall back into old patterns. We know this.”

They do. “And what triggered the not-eating?”

She leans back into the armchair, eyes flicking between the corners of the room. “Same pattern as always—I skip one meal, and then I skip more.”

“So what’s our game plan for next time?”

“Next time?”

“Missing a meal happens. I can’t promise it won’t ever happen again”—he wishes to God he could—"but next time it does, what’s the plan?”

She looks directly at him, then stands, abandoning the coat on the armchair. She drops into his lap on the sofa, facing him, and presses a kiss to his lips.

He’s not sure what he’s done to earn this, but seeing as that’s sort of the entire narrative of their marriage, he obliges happily. “What did I say?”

“You’re making a plan for when I mess up?”

“ _We’re_ making a plan for when you mess up,” he corrects her. “We’re gonna mess up, Sydney. We’re two disasters from dysfunctional families, right?”

She giggles, just a little.

“But you’re my disaster, and I’m yours.” He suddenly thinks of all their friends who have ended up happy together—Eddie and Jill, Rose and Dimitri, Sonya and Mikhail. Every one of those couples has stumbled across seemingly irreconcilable differences; every one of them gave up hope that they could ever be with one another. And every one of them learned better, and learned better together. For two children of divorce, he and Sydney have a lot of solid relationships to learn from.

“And we’re allowed to mess up and fall apart,” he whispers, “as long as we fall back together.”

She leans in against him, kissing his cheek softly. “You’ll be there to catch me when I fall.”

“You can count on it.”

They stay like that together, until the sky begins to lighten.


End file.
